Update:

Commenter MarkR made a great point: if possible, use some packaging tools, to try to maintain proper dependencies, to the extent that is possible. Install from the source should be Plan B. So, try yum install MySQL-python first.

This is mostly for my own future reference. It’ll be icing on the cake if it helps you!

This is geared for CentOS or Red Hat. Use apt-get or other packaging tools for different flavours of Linux.

1. Get Python module setuptools called easy_install. I love easy_install, by the way, sort of like CPAN for Perl modules;
2. To install MySQLdb package, you would think easy_install MySQLdb would do. But that is not the case. I hope the developer would fix that. Instead, you need:

easy_install MySQL-python

3. If you have build errors, you may need:
yum install python-devel or yum …

Next week I'll stay at Hyatt Santa Clara to attend the MySQL Conference and Expo 2011. This year I'll present one tutorial and two sessions.

- Linux and H/W optimizations for MySQL (Apr 11, 9:00-12:30)

- Automated, Non-Stop MySQL Operations and Failover (Apr 12, 15:05-15:50)

- Using MySQL As NoSQL - Introduction to HandlerSocket Plugin (Apr 13, 17:15-18:00) (Co-present with Kazuho Oku. He is a former employee at Cybozu Labs, and recently joined DeNA. He is an author of Q4M and MyCached(origin of HandlerSocket))

These talks will be based on my experiences as a former MySQL consultant and our experiences from running …

People keep asking me “what is going to happen to MySQL now that Oracle has screwed MySQL?” I bluntly disagree that any such thing has happened. This blog post is just my personal view and does not reflect my employer’s opinion, but Oracle might have saved MySQL from what I can see. There is no evidence that supports the hysterical doomsday theories. (Witness MySQL 5.5, probably the best MySQL release in history.

Join the MySQL Team as we celebrate the health and growth of the MySQL community. Whether you are an attendee at O'Reilly MySQL Conference, a member of local MySQL user groups, a MySQL user in the Bay Area, or simply interested in MySQL technology, you're all invited to Oracle's MySQL Community Reception at 8:30pm on April 13, 2011.

You'll get the opportunity to mingle with your peers as well as meeting MySQL engineers to get the first-hand information on the latest product development. Plus, complimentary food and beverages will be served to add the flavor and color of the night. RSVP today and get ready for an evening of relaxing and informative conversation!

Should you find yourself learning MySQL for professional gain or as a hobbyist interest there are some resources that you would be best advised engrossing yourself in to gain that extra inch. Considered a prime cut of opensource software, MySQL is very accessible and well documented. As you peel back the layers you will find a busy and extremely welcoming community ready to assist, collaborate and discuss reams of subject matter.

In terms of official resource you will find a plethora of mysql.com subdomains. One of my regular stops is planet.mysql.com. The custom built blog/news aggregator built by Arjen Lentz, is a rollup of articles submitted and labeled with the `mysql` keyword. Pop on over to read the latest musings from those giving their $0.02 on various topics. You will find plenty of articles on MySQL and frequently articles on forks, tools, findings and guides from some of …

A post on the HandlerSocket-dev mailing list the other day got me thinking about the performance of MySQL’s IN() construct versus HandlerSocket’s execute_multi. So I started a little test, using MySQL 5.5 + HandlerSocket’s latest commits: mysql> CREATE TABLE `test`.`t1` ( -> `id` int unsigned NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT, -> `val` char(32) NOT NULL, -> PRIMARY [...]

Things have been moving along well in the world of Xtrabackup Manager.

In the last week I managed to fix a some bugs and overcome a number of implementation issues. Most notably the internals have been re-factored significantly and now make use of PHP Exceptions.

You probably don't care about the re-factoring all that much if all you want to do is use the tool, but rest assured that it makes development easier, which in turn is going to be better for users!

Aside from the refactoring and probably more interesting -- I added the functionality to be able to perform a local restore any backup snapshot.

If you are using the standard "rolling incremental" backup method, then this means Xtrabackup Manager would first take a FULL backup of your target MySQL host and following that it would take incrementals.

With Xtrabackup Manager you have the ability to set a snapshot …

Combating “data drift”

In my first post in this series, I described materialized views (MVs). An MV is essentially a cached result set at one point in time. The contents of the MV will become incorrect (out of sync) when the underlying data changes. This loss of synchronization is sometimes called drift. This is conceptually similar to a replication slave that is behind. Until it catches up, the view of the data on the slave is “behind” the changes on the master. An important difference is that each MV could have drifted by a different length of time.

A view which has drifted out of sync must be refreshed. Since an MV drifts over time from the “base tables” (those tables on which the view was built) there must be a process to bring them up-to-date. …

Here’s the weekly review of Percona Server and XtraBackup news. Before I begin, let me briefly address a common question. We are sometimes asked about our plans in light of developments in the market such as MySQL 5.5, MariaDB, Drizzle, etc. The short answer is that we’re very happy with Oracle’s GPL’ed MySQL releases as a baseline for Percona Server, we think that it is extremely important to continue developing Percona Server, we don’t see the need for any major changes to how we’re doing that right now, and we plan to stay the course. This question has helped us to see the need for a prominent public roadmap for Percona Server’s future, and we will work on creating that, to provide a longer and more detailed answer to this and other questions. Now, on to the news:

In Percona Server news,

• We released Percona Server 5.5.10-20.1 as a Release Candidate. ( …

Opps… What happens when you press the post button instead of the preview button.  You publish a story before it’s time.

I’m working on compiling a complete list of MySQL storage engines. I didn’t intend to publish this so soon.  Maybe you can tell me what I’m missing.

Here is what I’ve found so far.  This is mostly an update of an older work I found.  Now that it’s posted I work hard to complete it.